Why the 66-year-old founder of Men's Wearhouse is launching an 'Uber for tailors'

At the ripe old age of 66, George Zimmer is joining the ranks of startup founders who take Uber as an inspiration.

Zimmer, best known for founding and serving as the public face of Men's Wearhouse before getting fired in a very public fashion in 2013, officially launched a new company on Monday called zTailors, which will let customers book tailors across the U.S. to come to their homes or offices and make alterations. To promote the new venture, Zimmer has borrowed the startup phrase du jour, describing zTailors as "Uber for tailors."

"Uber made their app easy to use so that even guys like me and everybody they know can use it," Zimmer, a self-professed technology luddite, told Mashable in an interview. "We’ve been trying to design our website and our app along the lines of Uber to make it easy to use."

zTailor currently offers "hundreds" of tailors on demand in markets across the U.S., with plans to grow that number to thousands soon enough. It charges a flat fee for alterations, depending on the clothing type. Pickup and deliveries are free.

For Zimmer, zTailor is a startup that should never have existed. He founded Men's Wearhouse in 1973 and ran the company for 40 years with the assumption he would work there for more years to come. Then, almost exactly two years ago, he was unceremoniously ousted from his own company and forced into what he assumed would be an early and permanent retirement.

"It was mostly disbelief more than anything else," Zimmer recalled feeling at the time in a phone interview with Mashable. He still speaks with that unmistakable gruff voice a few pitches below the lowest note on a piano.

But that ageless voice, full of guarantees in the commercials, sounds just a little more wounded now. "I'd been feeling like I was the heart and soul of the stores — and the people that fired me were not from the stores."

He added: "It always did bother me in the sense that I was no longer part of the team I had created."

Men's Wearhouse put out a release at the time saying Zimmer wanted to take the company private, potentially hurting shareholders. Zimmer later claimed the board had turned against him and blindsided him with an abrupt termination. Not sure what else to do in his 60s, he took up the pastime of all wealthy retired executives: golf.

"I tried to retire and failed," he says. "I play golf and tennis, but I don’t play particular well. I don’t like playing anymore than I like doing what I’m doing now which is building a business."

'Revenue is lagging way behind investment'

A little less than a year after his firing, Zimmer began thinking generally about a project to help tailors, who he felt were being "disrespected and undervalued" at retail shops around the country. While that impulse drew on his lifetime of experience in retail, the idea and execution for zTailors was completely new to him.

"When I went into business the first time, my cash register was mechanical, not electrical," Zimmer recalls. "There almost... may be absolutely nothing that was similar [with this launch] to 43 years ago."

To help with launching the business, Zimmer turned to some big name technology mentors, including Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and WorkDay cofounder David Duffield.

New technology isn't the only difference Zimmer has had to get accustomed to.

"When you open a store, you do start to do revenue from the moment you open," he says. With a technology startup like zTailor, however, "the revenue is lagging way way behind investment in the network."

Some industry watchers will likely characterize Zimmer's efforts here as a redemption story, or an attempt to eventually take on the company that let him go — or at the very least, a passion product to keep him busy in his later years. Zimmer, for his part, claims that it is now a personal mission.

"I can be the Pied Piper of tailors," he says, presumably not referring to the fictional startup in Silicon Valley. "And help not only create more income for them, but also help them understand technology and the 21st century. I find that very attractive."

"I consider this a beginning point and not an end point," he adds. "I’m launching a new business and I’m only 66 and feeling great. I'd like to do this for another decade."

Mashable
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